70 pages • 2 hours read
Federico García LorcaLa Casa De Bernarda Alba
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Sexual Repression
Perhaps the most readily apparent theme Lorca explores through this story is that of the sexual repression of his contemporaries, especially women. As Amelia woefully declares in Act II, “To be born a woman’s the worst possible punishment” (185). From what one can deduce from the double standards of propriety and sexual conduct that Lorca transposes from his society to the fictional one of his play, Amelia’s comment does not read far out of proportion. The expectations placed the people of this village are strict and unyielding; however, they are much more severe for women than men. When La Poncia tells the daughters about the dancer/prostitute who follows the reaper men and sells them her services, she recounts: “Years ago another one of those women came here, and I gave my eldest son some money so he could go. Men need things like that” (185). La Poncia’s story is one example of how the men of the village both have more opportunity and more leniency to transgress against the social expectations of sexual conduct.
This house of unmarried, virginal women slowly aging past the prime of their youth without any hope of marriage or romance is a pitiful place for Lorca to set his play; but by throwing the character of Pepe el Romano into this milieu, pitiful circumstances ignite instantly into conflict rife with dramatic action. Adela describes what she feels for Pepe, saying, “Looking in his eyes I seem to drink his blood slowly” (183). When La Poncia tries to reason with her, insisting that there will be terrible consequences for her if she chooses to act on these desires, Adela bravely says, “Bring four thousand yellow flares and set them about the walls of the yard. No one can stop what has to happen” (183). Adela’s defiance for the sake of love and lust is a powerful force in the play. The Servant sums this up well when she observes, “Bernarda thinks nothing can stand against her, yet she doesn’t know the strength a man has among women alone” (203).
Cycles of Oppression
Cycles of oppression, largely established through the importance of inheritance, is an obvious recurring theme of the play’s plot. The issue of dowries and the effect they have on the marriageability among the women of the house is key to the play’s major conflict. Lorca employs the plot element of inheritance to explore a larger question about cycles of oppression within families.
There are three generations in Bernarda’s house, represented by the elderly María Josefa, Bernarda, and her five daughters. All three generations suffer similar deprivations, misfortunes, and disappointments at the hands of a society which values only their bodies and their inheritable wealth. Bernarda, however, is an excellent example of how the oppressed learn to become instruments of oppression. The rule of mourning that she imposes upon her daughters is a custom inherited from previous generations. In Act I, she explains:
For eight years of mourning, not a breath of air will get in this house from the street. We’ll act as if we’d sealed up doors and windows with bricks. That’s what happened in my father’s house—and in my grandfather’s house (164).
Cruelty only begets more cruelty, and the traumas of one generation become those of the next.
Cycles of Violence
Outbursts of violence occur at every level of the play, public and private. The most iconic violence occurs at the hands of Bernarda with her cane, which she wields ruthlessly as a form of punishment when her daughters defy her rule. First Angustias and then Martirio fall victim to spontaneous rage-fueled beatings after committing particularly egregious acts of defiance (e.g., lying about eavesdropping on the men on the patio after the funeral, or stealing the keepsake portrait of Pepe). When Adela’s affair with Pepe is discovered and revealed, however, the stage directions indicate how Adela “snatches away her mother’s cane and breaks it in two” (209), proclaiming in her defiance, “This is what I do with the tyrant’s cane” (209). Although this moment falls less than a page before Adela resorts to suicide—an end which tragically replaces Bernarda’s violent act with a final act of violence against herself—Adela’s act of breaking her mother’s cane is also an act that frees herself from powerlessness.
The most horrific moment of violence in the play, however, occurs at the very end of Act II when an angry mob tortures and kills a young woman from the village in the midst of a public frenzy. La Poncia returns to the house with the news once the tumult begins: “Librada’s daughter, the unmarried one, had a child and no one knows whose it is! [...] And to hide her shame she killed it and hit it under the rocks. [...] Now they want to kill her” (195). Bernarda and her daughters go out to their front door and heckle the crowd as it passes, urging the mob on to greater acts of torture. Bernarda yells, “finish her before the guards come! Hot coals in the place where she sinned!” (195). The suddenness with which the women are able to join in with this frenzy of violence betrays more about the depths of bitterness in this community than about their reactions to the woman herself. A young woman who has secretly transgressed and obtained something they all desire most then committed a horrendous crime in order to cover it up, is an ideal scapegoat upon which to unleash every repressed taboo emotion—lust, envy, disappointment, jealousy, hatred, etc.
In this way, Lorca demonstrates how repression leads to violence, and violence to repression. Together, they form a cycle which continues, passed down within communities via trauma inherited across generations. As Martirio woefully observes, “[H]istory repeats itself. I can see that everything is a terrible repetition” (169).
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By Federico García Lorca
